Israel Lund

Israel Lund (born 1980, Bellow Falls, Vermont) is a conceptual painter based in Brooklyn, New York. He creates acrylic paintings using a combination of digital and analog techniques including silk-screening; digital painting; and the manipulation of photocopies, photographs and PDFs through smartphone applications.[1] His practice has been described as its “own distinctive kind of post-digital abstraction.”[2]

Lund's work concerns the “modularity and scalability” of analog painting.[1] As described by critic and art historian Alex Bacon, Lund's paintings evoke an uncanny “screen-space” that is produced in an “analog-mode” via a silk-screening process, a concept that the artist refers to as “analog.jpg”.[3] In his recent work, this process involves imprinting the palette knife through a silk screen onto the warp and weft of raw, coarse canvas.[4] The result is a dappled or “pixelated” miasma of cyan, magenta, and yellow.[5] Thea Ballard describes Lund's regimented technique as “ascetic”:

“This method is perhaps ascetic, following strict parameters of both process and dimension; most of his works conform to the dimensions of 8.5 x 11 inches (such economical tendencies nod to Lund’s roots in hardcore punk and zine-making). His initial experiments were rendered in black and white, but Lund also uses cyan, magenta, and yellow ink, a nod to CMYK printing, method commonly used reproduce photographs in print, in which these colors overlap to create a spectrum.”[6]

Working within a set of specific material constraints, Lund pushes painterly abstraction to its absolute limit. Ballard continues: “The canvas itself is less an endpoint than several (or maybe infinite?) portals or nodes through which these images are transferred.”[6]

The artist's background in hardcore punk, according to Ballard, brings a sense of musicality to bear on his work: “Lund is fond of the term noise, which here stands in well for texture, inscribing the work with a dissident musicality.”[6] Laura McLean-Ferris alternately describes this aural quality as “the snow crash of white noise.”[6] She writes: “What the noiselike qualities of Lund’s paintings, scatterings of buzz and drag, also powerfully resist is translatability, another historic signifying system that has classically been attached to painting.”[6]